Deep Freeze coming for Fedora 7 (and cvs branching coming too)

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 04:43:13PM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> Unless a guideline is marked as a "should" it is mandatory.  If you
> disagree with something the guidelines say is a must, the proper thing
> to do is to get the guideline changed.[1]_

For the static libraries, I voiced my concerns on fedora-packaging, Ralf
responded without answering my arguments, I reresponded and nothing
happened after that. Although there had been a big thread were my point
appeared clearly, and more recently in another thread about static libs
naming. Now I am tired to relaunch the subject just to have nobody 
answering anything relevant, so I bypass the guidelines.

> For changelogs, the guidelines say: "Every time you make changes, that
> is, whenever you increment the E-V-R of a package, add a changelog
> entry."
> This means you must write a changelog entry.  The reasons are given in
> the guidelines [2]_.

Sometimes it is silly to add a changelog entry in that case I don't add
a changelog entry, period. (You can have a look at my cvs commit entries
for example see recent commit for the cernlib if you like ti understand
why).
 
> For static libraries, the guidelines recognize that there may be
> instances where static libraries are desirable.  If you want to either
> provide static libraries in a subpackage or to link against static
> libraries you must ask FESCo for permission.  This check was written for
> several reasons:
> 
> 1) static libraries are a security hazard and there is a strong desire
> to keep the libraries from being linked into packages provided by
> Fedora.  This check helps FESCo and the packaging committee enforce
> this.

Moot for numerical libraries.

> 2) The Packaging Committee realized that there are packages that need to
> contravene this policy but not how many.  If there are hundreds of
> libraries in Fedora requesting to ship static libraries then the
> guideline must be revised to accommodate them.  If it's only a dozen
> then having exceptions for those packages is sufficient.

I always said that I agreed to report to FESCo that I ship a static lib,
but that it was silly to ask FESCo when I know better, and I won't do it.

> 3) The Packaging Committee realized that this draft could be made better
> if we could draft a statement that covered the valid cases without
> letting packages without sufficient reasons in.  However we didn't have
> a large enough sample of valid packages to be able to write that yet.
> By having this reported we would be able to gather information on what
> rule could be made to fit this.

There is at least the cernlib, the gsl, lapack, blas, and certainly
netcdf, hdf.

Some packages have static libs because upstream doesn't provide a shared
lib, like (packages I know because I maintain them) libnet10, libnet.
It is quite unfortunate in that case but I have argued a lot of time why
I think it is better not to introduce shared libs in fedora at that
point.

> Deciding "not to bother FESCo" with this is not saving us time; it is
> making it so someone down the line has to spend time finding which
> packages are linking against static libraries without an exemption and
> figure out what the proper fix is.

That's wrong. No package will ever link against static libs when there
are shared libs. And I agree that static packages in -static packages 
is right in most cases (I think that for the cernlib it is not right 
so I made an exception for that lib, but this is a very specific case)
so this is doubly wrong.

> '''
> The Packaging Guidelines are a collection of common issues and the
> severity that should be placed on them. While these guidelines should
> not be ignored, they should also not be blindly followed. If you think
> that your package should be exempt from part of the Guidelines, please
> bring the issue to the Fedora Packaging Committee.
> '''

I did it without success.

--
Pat